Mike Manning paints with an electric spray canister on an electric board Sunday at OpenWorld.

Mike Manning paints with an electric spray canister on an electric board Sunday at OpenWorld.

Photo: James Tensuan, SFC

Oracle on solid footing as OpenWorld wraps up

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For Oracle, the news coming out of the company's annual congregation at the Moscone Center wasn't as dramatic as the epic come-from-behind victory by the Oracle-sponsored America's Cup yacht team on San Francisco Bay.

But in many ways, that's how the company's 400,000 customers like it. For those users, which include some of the world's biggest corporations, staying on course is better for the bottom line than constantly tacking and jibing.

"They haven't announced any major changes in strategy, and sometimes that can be the big news," Dennis Gaughan of the Gartner technology research firm said of Oracle.

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"That's often viewed very positively by customers," said Gaughan, managing vice president of research. "You don't want somebody that's changing every 18 months."

The five-day OpenWorld wrapped up Thursday, and although the final attendance numbers weren't in, the event was on course to attract about 60,000 people from around the world, about 20 percent more than last year. It's an indication of the growing interest in Oracle's products, which include software used for human resources, database and inventory management; the high-end computer systems that run those operations; and the middleware applications that run in between.

For the average consumer, "it has so little impact directly on the things that we do every day because we never see Oracle," said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a research and advisory firm in San Mateo. Oracle "is on the back end for a lot of the things that we just take for granted."

CEO Larry Ellison - when he wasn't out on the bay cheering his Oracle Team USA in the America's Cup - and other top Oracle executives used the convention to announce new products such as a database storage system that promises faster data analytics and processing speeds, a bigger, faster computer server and a host of cloud computing services.

Clients reassured

Gartner research Vice President Charles Eschinger said the announcements were part of Oracle's previously disclosed road map, but it was still important for the company to show it is "staying the course" and making progress.

For OpenWorld exhibitors such as Ken Comée, president and CEO of Redwood City startup Badgeville, the event isn't just to see whether Oracle has new or better products, but to learn how to make Oracle products work better with systems offered by competitors.

And that's because customers of Badgeville, which makes "gamefication" systems for businesses to induce more customer loyalty or worker productivity, also use a variety of enterprise software and hardware.

"You're really looking at the ecosystem," Comée said. "So we work with Oracle, we work with IBM, we work with Microsoft, we work with Accenture, Deloitte, Pricewaterhouse. There's a lot of 'co-opetition' in this space. There's so much overlap in products and services."

Li said events such as OpenWorld can be seen as a big dance among giants like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce.com "and a lot of smaller players trying to dance amongst them," Li said. The giants have to make sure they don't step on the smaller dancers, "but it also means they have to dance nicely with each other," Li said. "It's not about who is the best dancer, but who makes the best partner."

Some attendees said Oracle still needs to do a better job partnering. The products might be "the best of breed," but they don't always run seamlessly, said Vegar Bøthun, chief information officer with Statoil Fuel & Retail of Norway.

"Oracle is a sales machine, that's their business," Bøthun said. "Other software companies give their salespeople bonuses on software maintenance as well, and that's a little bit healthier because it makes their salespeople think about tomorrow and the operations they actually sold last year."

Bøthun said Oracle's sales force needs to "think about maintaining the satisfaction of existing customers and they have to nurture the relationships they have," he said. "Don't just sell them a bunch of software and hardware and then say, 'Thank you and goodbye,' and (be) more concerned about what you're going to buy next year."

Ray Pang, director of marketing for Skyera, a San Jose maker of solid-state storage systems for businesses, noted that Oracle was making progress with its cloud computing offerings.

"They are little bit late in terms of the cloud, but now they are gung ho, they are going after it," Pang said. "I don't think anybody can underestimate Oracle."

Social credibility

Altimeter Group's Li said one of Oracle's biggest challenges in the near future is to show it can compete with its relatively new enterprise social media products.

"Oracle isn't known as being a social company and having a social product," Li said. "There's a bit of a credibility gap right now in the space compared to some of their bigger competitors like IBM and Adobe and Salesforce. You don't hear about Oracle being authentic and transparent."

But Oracle does know how "to build and to leverage and to support relationships," she said. "You see it in their sales cycles and their product development. They absolutely get it. It's a matter of connecting the dots so they can have greater credibility in the social space."

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